Tag: Review
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‘Brute Force’ is Best At Its Weariest
Which is to say when disgust at the prison-industrial complex is at its barest.
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‘Slums of Beverly Hills’: Family Values
The ensemble pushing it all forward is uniformly excellent, although Lyonne is so exceptional — she turns feigning bewilderment into an art form — that she predominantly is the person who makes the movie worth pursuing.
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The Indelible Paranoia of ‘The Parallax View’
The storyline is so rife with close calls and contrived developments that I ultimately enjoyed ‘The Parallax View’ not as I would, say, ‘All the President’s Men,’ which was as mistrustful as it was plausible-feeling. It’s more like fretful, intelligently designed pulp fiction.
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‘The Kids Are All Right’: Or Maybe Not
Cholodenko has made ‘The Kids Are All Right’ not in the key of an American tragedy but rather in the spirit of a semi-lightweight slice-of-life dramedy.
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You Can’t Look Away from ‘Color of Night’
I like to think of ‘Color of Night’ not as a mere failure but more a kind of transcendent moment where every one of the erotic thriller’s most tiresome tropes coalesced and then started the process of stupefying genre self-cannibalization.
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‘Cherry Falls’ is a Solid Teen Slasher Movie
‘Cherry Falls’ felt kind of like a balm when I saw it.
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‘The Lodger’ is Feature-Length Foreshadowing
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 movie thrillingly offers ideas and themes that would later be more deeply explored at their most fetal.
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‘The American President’: An Appetizer for ‘The West Wing’
It’s a broad-stroked, entertaining admixture of love and politics.
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In a Lonely Place
On ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’ and ‘The Report.’
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School Daze
On ‘Selah and the Spades,’ ‘The Half of It,’ and ‘Bad Education.’
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‘Working Girl’ Has a Bad Aftertaste
With its sitcom-esque inflections, it becomes a cockeyed horror movie.
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‘Mars Attacks’: More Fun to Talk About Than Watch
It’s Tim Burton doing an expensive, star-studded tribute to the schlocky, shoestring-budgeted sci-fi thrillers of the 1950s.
Peterson Reviews 